A demonstration of the next release of Novell's Linux for desktops drew cheers and applause Wednesday, although the final version of the software is not expected for some months. Nat Friedman, the company's vice president of Linux desktop engineering, showed Novell Linux Desktop 10 playing videos and MP3 music files, and exchanging music and photos with an iPod and a digital camera, in a keynote presentation at the Solutions Linux conference and trade show on the outskirts of Paris.

i know it's hard to keep up with everything that's been happening in the open source space, but one would expect Novell as an entity to know. i wonder if Nat was misquoted or if he's just unaware ...

not that i'd be surprised. their "director of the linux program office" was unaware of what freedesktop.org was when i spoke with him at a conference last month, even though he spoke about the open source desktop in his presentation. =)

i don't think novell is to blame, its more Nat i guess. notice you always read stuff like "The Linux user environment has ..." and stuff like that, while they're talking about gnome. gnome is not A desktop environment for linux, and GTK is not A graphical linux toolkit, no.... gnome is THE (one and only) desktop environment, idem dito GTK is THE graphical toolkit for linux.

now i wouldn't say that if i where a gnome developer, or writing an announcement for gnome - its most likely used by less users than 'the other DE', and it has a minority of FOSS developers (yes, most gnome dev's are be payed for their work, and KDE is done by volunteers).

anyway, this might not be to blame on the gnomes at all - the development of Gnome is mostly steered by Red Hat and Novell - money money money. so its mostly big $$ corporate PR talk coming from official gnome announcements, generally speaking. i think gnome (at least its users) would be better of without Red Hat and Novell...